Phänomenologische Forschungen 2007

Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology which he characterized as an eidetic science of transcendentally reduced phenomena aims at least at material-apriori laws of a special kind, namely eidetic descriptive laws built up from pure descriptive concepts. The paper explicates Husserl’s notion of essence in the broad sense as a state-of-affairs-function (Sachverhaltsfunktion); this noematic function is the objective „correlate“ of the propositional function which we call a „concept“ and which is part of the proposition, i.e. the state-of-affairs-meaning (Sachverhaltsmeinung), in which a state of affairs is projected. Essences in the narrow or pregnant sense are pure essences which Husserl named „Eidé“. The concept of pure essence relevant for the phenomenological descriptive eidetics is elucidated through the explication of Husserl’s notion of a pure descriptive concept, so as to show how these concepts, which are pure type concepts, differ from impure descriptive concepts, especially from concepts denoting natural kinds. Grounded exclusively in pure descriptive concepts, the eidetic descriptive laws (Wesensgesetze) have special truth conditions and a need for special ways of examination. The proper place of the method called „eidetic variation“ is the examination, falsification or justification of presumed eidetic descriptive laws. Starting from familiar exemplary cases of states of affairs which confirm the presumed law, the free variation, which operates in pure fantasy, has the task of constructing possible counterexamples to falsify the presumed eidetic law. The property of being falsifiable by counterexamples constructed in pure fantasy allows for a distinction between empirical laws and the eidetic descriptive laws of Husserlian eidetics. The falsifiability by fictional and factual counterexamples shows that Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is a scientific enterprise open to intersubjective examination precisely due to its eidetic character.

In Being and Time the broken piece of equipment (§ 16) or the dead body of an Other (§ 47) were seen as resulting from a process of transition (Übergang) between an original state and a position not so removed from it that one had to do with something entirely different. ‚The Origin of the Work of Art‘ takes a more radical approach: rather than leading toward a ‚no longer, but not yet‘, the movement here is toward a ‚no longer, but already‘. Hence its famous thesis: either art is at work, or it is no longer art and already a mere object of art, a piece of art. Contrary to those of Heidegger’s readers who have suggested that his earlier views on transition would have saved him some of the (i.e. political) trouble the art essay runs into, the present paper aims to show that both the earlier and the later view fail to come to terms with what happens in transition as such. This is illustrated by an analysis of the corpse (ad BT § 47), and of junk (ad BT § 16) and leads us to a different approach to what is at stake in art and in the kind of Darstellung exemplified by it.

Following Derrida’s early claim from Voice and Phenomenon that Husserl’s phenomenology was a philosophy of life, the article focuses on the second of two aspects that there are to such a claim. While the first one – which amounts to revealing negatively (as Derrida does) that the Ego in Husserl is immortal, that Husserl is unable to grasp the temporal structure of the Ego in its dependency from its finitude and thus from death (which supposedly only Heidegger did), and so forth – is well-known and widely debated, the second one has been mostly ignored so far: Is Derrida not also implying – positively, as it were – that Husserlian phenomenology does indeed have the potential to show a way to a philosophy of life escaping the pitfalls of transcendental egology? Might deconstruction (an „affirmative business“ after all, as the later Derrida kept reminding us) not be an attempt to a critical, i.e. a non-naïve, philosophy of life and thus a re-appropriation (under better circumstances, as e.g. the knowledge of Husserl’s later and latest works and notes) of motifs known from Georg Misch’s 1930 pioneering project of an approximation of phenomenology and philosophy of life, re-arranged in Derrida and others around the decisive shift of view from death to birth, from being singular to being plural – to the community?

This paper discusses Hans-Georg Gadamer’s account of what he sees as a major change in the approach to the Western philosophical and aesthetic traditions that began in the second half of the eighteenth century, and the results of this change today. According to Gadamer, these traditions ceased to be binding at this time and became objects of historical research. Instead of being seen even as potential sources of insight, traditional knowledge claims and works of art were subjected to historical and aesthetic analysis. And Gadamer holds that these approaches have partially come to encompass the present as well. Thus, modern art has often downplayed cognitive and pedagogical tasks in proceeding in a purely aesthetic, playful way. And the study of history has been seen as providing insight into the contextually determined nature of presuppositions, those of the modern age included. According to Gadamer, this unduly limits the possibilities of both art and history to provide learning.

Gadamer’s hermeneutics is no discipline or simply a foundation of the Humanities, but addresses the fundamental problem of phenomenology: how things show themselves and can be attained. It does so, however, not in Husserl’s terminology but in its “ontological turn”. In elaborating on the ontology of language, Gadamer equates the accessibility of things and their Being, a move eminent in the “speculative character of language” discussed in the third part of Truth and Method. For Gadamer as well as for Heidegger, ontology is possible only as phenomenology. How things show themselves, however, cannot be understood in relation to an absolute consciousness or understanding Dasein, but, following Plato, from the “evidence of the beautiful” in an hermeneutics of the artwork. Gadamer’s phenomenology thus describes the accessibility of things as the coming to pass of their truth and presence, much as the later Heidegger does in relation to physis and openness. Hermeneutical reflection of the fundamental problem of phenomenology also reveals the displacement in the continuity of coming to pass as the “space between words” opened in the manifold of interpretations.

According to Lévinas, art is an ambiguous phenomenon. He shares this conviction with Plato and bases it on Platonic arguments. Lévinas often refers to the Platonic critique of writing in the dialogue Phaedrus and employs it to support the thesis that all works, especially all artworks, are subject to misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Art is lacking the immediacy of the ethical encounter with the Other, and it allows us to evade reality. In this article, I will turn to the ambiguity of art and show that the diagnosis of an ambiguity is convincing, yet might not necessarily yield a rejection of art.

Concerning the modern discussion about the relation between event and narration and “Time and Narration” (Paul Ricoeur) the author asks about the relation between entanglement and narration in Wilhelm Schapps philosophy of stories. The philosophy of stories does not approve a systematisation of the topic but does allow its discussion under various aspects. Among those, the author chooses the existence of narrations in the stories of the entangled, the silent speaking, the entanglement in a positive world and the relation between the story of one’s life and poetry. The essay also is a contribution to basic questions of narrative ethics.

The basic intention of this paper is to approach the phenomenon of violence from the perspective of Jan Patočka’s “a-subjective phenomenology.” As I argue, violence is a “boundary phenomenon” that has not yet been analyzed adequately in the phenomenological tradition. Its analysis requires a revision of phenomenology. However, such a revision can not only be found in recent positions, but already in Patočka’s conception. Thus, I propose to reassess his basic ideas that are derived from both a strong criticism of Husserl’s subjectivism and Heidegger’s anti-intellectualism. In this context, I use Patočka’s respective insights concerning the “phenomenal field” and the “movement of human existence,” to develop a phenomenological analysis of the various ways violence affects our selves: As I argue, it does so by destroying incorporated patterns of understanding, by oppressing the meaningful frameworks of our pregiven life-world, and, finally, by undermining our primordial trust in the other.

Starting with an analysis of Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower as defining feature of modernity, the present essay moves on to discuss different interpretations of “life” in the political theories of Giorgio Agamben and Hanna Arendt. The aim is to understand what transformations biopower has undergone since Foucault’s first studies. According to Jürgen Habermas biopower today has turned into liberal eugenics and bioengineering is replacing the natural origin of man causing a crisis of subjectivity, whereas from a Heideggerian point of view, the attempt to redesign human nature by means of biotechnology marks the summit of reifying subjectivism.#

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Causerien 1948. Radiovorträge; Alessandro Delcò: Merleau-Ponty et l’expérience de la création. Du paradigme au schème; Christian Grüny: Zerstörte Erfahrung. Eine Phänomenologie des Schmerzes; Don E. Marietta Jr.: Beyond certainty. A phenomenological approach to moral reflection; Franz Gmainer-Pranzl: Heterotopie der Vernunft. Skizze einer Methodologie interkulturellen Philosophierens auf dem Hintergrund der Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls